Anyway. Where were we? Ah yes: novelty socks. Novelty socks probably rocketed to sock stardom in the 80s, when hilarious ties were all the rage with office workers who wanted everyone to think their jobs were fun. The logical next step (particularly for the sartorially conscious, for whom the idea of wearing mismatched sock and tie) was of course novelty socks. If you’re going to wear a kipper-shaped piece of silk embossed with the smiling face of Fred Flintstone to a high-end board meeting, you might as well complete the look with matching Dino and Bam-Bam novelty socks.
All of which speculation leads us to a rather fine point: what, exactly constitutes “novelty socks”? What is it that sets a pair of socks apart, as novelty socks rather than just woolly footwear with silly pictures on? On the far end of the scale, novelty socks are obvious: they have separated toes, like foot-gloves; raised patterns; silly grips; or they’re even shaped like stuff other than feet. Though of course when one gets to the shaped-sock phenomenon, one feels one is talking more about slippers than novelty socks. Still. At the outré end of the scale, I think we can agree that novelty socks are fairly easy to spot. Step back towards the merely patterned, though, and one has to repeat the question: just what are novelty socks?
P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Bertie Wooster, in one of his familiar contretemps with his man, Jeeves, reacts with high dudgeon when the hidebound feller refuses to see eye-to-eye with him on the matter of a pair of “socks with lavender clocks”. These days, lavender-clocked socks (“clocking” simply being those little dashy designs you get on colourful posh socks) would, if anything, be rather ordinary. In Edwardian England, one assumes, they were the height of raciness. Therefore, the lavender-clocked socks of the story are, at the time in which that story is set, novelty socks, because they step outside the norm for what was and was not worn betwixt foot and shoe in the Roaring Twenties. By the same logic, modern novelty socks would have to be something rather spectacular: along the lines, say, of a faithfully-knitted reproduction of Alan Hansen’s head. Go England.
